632 research outputs found
Postoperative peri-axillary seroma following axillary artery cannulation for surgical treatment of acute type A aortic dissection
The arterial cannulation site for optimal tissue perfusion and cerebral protection during cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) for surgical treatment of acute type A aortic dissection remains controversial. Right axillary artery cannulation confers significant advantages, because it provides antegrade arterial perfusion during cardiopulmonary bypass, and allows continuous antegrade cerebral perfusion during hypothermic circulatory arrest, thereby minimizing global cerebral ischemia. However, right axillary artery cannulation has been associated with serious complications, including problems with systemic perfusion during cardiopulmonary bypass, problems with postoperative patency of the artery due to stenosis, thrombosis or dissection, and brachial plexus injury. We herein present the case of a 36-year-old Caucasian man with known Marfan syndrome and acute type A aortic dissection, who had direct right axillary artery cannulation for surgery of the ascending aorta. Postoperatively, the patient developed an axillary perigraft seroma. As this complication has, not, to our knowledge, been reported before in cardiothoracic surgery, we describe this unusual complication and discuss conservative and surgical treatment options
Findings of a review of spacecraft fire safety needs
Discussions from a workshop to guide UCLA and NASA investigators on the state of knowledge and perceived needs in spacecraft fire safety and its risk management are reviewed, for an introduction to an analytical and experimental project in this field. The report summarizes the workshop discussions and includes the visual aids used in the presentations. Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) methods, which are currently not used, would be of great value to the designs and operation of future human-crew spacecraft. Key points in the discussions were the importance of understanding and testing smoldering as a likely fire scenario in space and the need for smoke damage modeling, since many fire-risk models ignore this mechanism and consider only heat damage
A test of Local Realism with entangled kaon pairs and without inequalities
We propose the use of entangled pairs of neutral kaons, considered as a
promising tool to close the well known loopholes affecting generic Bell's
inequality tests, in a specific Hardy-type experiment. Hardy's contradiction
without inequalities between Local Realism and Quantum Mechanics can be
translated into a feasible experiment by requiring ideal detection efficiencies
for only one of the observables to be alternatively measured. Neutral kaons are
near to fulfil this requirement and therefore to close the efficiency loophole.Comment: 4 RevTeX page
Cardiac surgery in a patient with retroperitoneal fibrosis and heart valvulopathy, both due to pergolide medication for Parkinson's disease
Retroperitoneal fibrosis is best described as a chronic inflammatory process which may be idiopathic, but can rarely be brought about by medications, such as pergolide, used for treating Parkinson's disease. Pergolide can produce a fibrotic process in heart valves, resulting in valve insufficiency in up to 25% of cases. Herein we describe the case of a 68-year-old man who received pergolide for 2 years for Parkinson's disease. The patient developed retroperitoneal fibrosis resulting in renal failure from ureteral obstruction necessitating ureteral stenting, as well as significant aortic and mitral valve insufficiency. He successfully underwent surgery for combined aortic valve, mitral valve and ascending aorta replacement because of severe valve insufficiency and dilated (d = 5.8 cm) ascending aorta. Retroperitoneal fibrosis improved with pergolide cessation and corticosteroid treatment. This is the second case reported in the literature, of a patient who had double valve and ascending aorta replacement surgery because he suffered from this rare but serious adverse effect of dopamine agonists used for managing Parkinson's disease
About entanglement properties of kaons and tests of hidden variables models
In this letter we discuss entanglement properties of neutral kaons systems
and their use for testing local realism. In particular we show that, as
previous proposals, also a scheme recently suggested for performing a test of
hidden variable theories against standard quantum mechanics cannot be
conclusive
GeantV: Results from the prototype of concurrent vector particle transport simulation in HEP
Full detector simulation was among the largest CPU consumer in all CERN
experiment software stacks for the first two runs of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). In the early 2010's, the projections were that simulation demands would
scale linearly with luminosity increase, compensated only partially by an
increase of computing resources. The extension of fast simulation approaches to
more use cases, covering a larger fraction of the simulation budget, is only
part of the solution due to intrinsic precision limitations. The remainder
corresponds to speeding-up the simulation software by several factors, which is
out of reach using simple optimizations on the current code base. In this
context, the GeantV R&D project was launched, aiming to redesign the legacy
particle transport codes in order to make them benefit from fine-grained
parallelism features such as vectorization, but also from increased code and
data locality. This paper presents extensively the results and achievements of
this R&D, as well as the conclusions and lessons learnt from the beta
prototype.Comment: 34 pages, 26 figures, 24 table
Bell inequalities for entangled kaons and their unitary time evolution
We investigate Bell inequalities for neutral kaon systems from Phi resonance
decay to test local realism versus quantum mechanics. We emphasize the unitary
time evolution of the states, that means we also include all decay product
states, in contrast to other authors. Only this guarantees the use of the
complete Hilbert space. We develop a general formalism for Bell inequalities
including both arbitrary "quasi spin" states and different times; finally we
analyze Wigner-type inequalities. They contain an additional term, a correction
function h, as compared to the spin 1/2 or photon case, which changes
considerably the possibility of quantum mechanics to violate the Bell
inequality. Examples for special "quasi spin" states are given, especially
those which are sensitive to the CP parameters epsilon and epsilon'.Comment: REVTeX, 22 page
Decoherence of entangled kaons and its connection to entanglement measures
We study the time evolution of the entangled kaon system by considering the
Liouville - von Neumann equation with an additional term which allows for
decoherence. We choose as generators of decoherence the projectors to the
2-particle eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. Then we compare this model with the
data of the CPLEAR experiment and find in this way an upper bound on the
strength of the decoherence. We also relate to an effective
decoherence parameter considered previously in literature. Finally we
discuss our model in the light of different measures of entanglement, i.e. the
von Neumann entropy , the entanglement of formation and the concurrence
, and we relate the decoherence parameter to the loss of
entanglement: .Comment: comments and references added, 18 pages, 1 figur
"The non-ischemic repair" as a safe alternative method for repair of anterior post-infarction VSD
Patient's myocardium with post-infarction ventricular septum defect (VSD) is characterized by severe dysfunction. The "additive ischemia" caused by the operating process of cross-clamp ischemia and reperfusion injury, has a significant aggravation to the myocardium and overall negative impact to patient's outcome. We present a useful, safe and advantageous methodology in order to abolish "the toxic phase" of ischemia-reperfusion which is adopted by most as the "classic repair method" of myocardial protection. This abolition is in our opinion, particularly beneficial in order to reverse postoperatively the Low Cardiac Output Syndrome (LOS) and achieve better short and long term results. By using this method we avoid the aortic occlusion, the use of systematic hypothermia and any cardioplegic arrest. Furthermore, the total cardio-pulmonary bypass (CPB) time is significantly reduced, tissue debridement and stitching is much easier and safer. We think the method is applicable for every anterior and apical case of post-infarction septum rupture. After application of method in 3 patients with anterior post-myocardial infarction VSD, we are convinced that the patient will have a better postoperative haemodynamic condition and therefore a better outcome
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